


Remind Me of This

by ninthlife



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: The Day of the Doctor, F/M, Gallifrey, Gallifrey Falls No More, Gen, Touch Telepathy, references to Tralfamadore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23171968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninthlife/pseuds/ninthlife
Summary: Nine, a puzzle box, and the Bad Wolf girl.
Relationships: Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler | Bad Wolf
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29





	Remind Me of This

**Author's Note:**

> The first time I watched "The Day of the Doctor," I wasn't really familiar with most Doctor Who lore... so when I rewatched it yesterday I was really disappointed! They shouldn't have done it without Christopher Eccelston. I finally understand what my friend Becca is talking about when she complains about a "big red button." And I have my own ideas about what a Time War is. So, I thought I'd play in the Doctor Who sandbox for a little while, even though Nine is _so_ 2005 (still - he has the hottest nose).
> 
> I'm gifting this piece of Dale Pike because I really admire her work and how unafraid she is to experiment and remix stuff in an effort to communicate complex ideas.
> 
> The title comes from the song "A Reminder" by Radiohead. I really love this entire song. One time, I walked from an airport in Seattle all the way to my friend's house, stopping only at an aviation-themed diner to recharge my phone. When I finally arrived, my Buffy loving friend's boyfriend had this song stuck in his head. He is a physics professor that loves to answer my questions about dark matter and he reminds me of the Doctor. I was really coming around to God at this time - it was on that walk I decided to get the tattoo on my shoulder - and for some reason the fact that he was singing this song has always stayed with me. I had never really listened to the lyrics, before. The opening verse is:
> 
> _If I get old  
>  I will not give in  
> But if I do  
> Remind me of this:_

“I just don’t look,” says Nine.

The thing that is not Rose tilts its head. “Hm?”

“I close my eyes. I’m not here. I don’t look, and it disappears. Like a magic trick.”

Nine sits on the floor of the shack with his back to the thing that is not Rose, not looking. His fingers deftly probe the moving mechanisms of the puzzle box, one of its faces open like a gaping mouth. It is bigger on the inside. To the box’s right, Nine is reassembling the pieces into an as-of-yet unidentifiable structure.

“I’m not there, I’m here. And then I’m not even here. It’s over, and it didn’t work, and I’m kissing you.”

“Not quite me,” says the thing that is not quite Rose.

“Exactly you,” corrects the Doctor, still not looking at her. “I can’t be certain of much—especially not now—but it’s you, not—not—”

_“Rose.”_

The Doctor removes another gear from the puzzle box with a satisfying click. “Disarming a time bomb—you’ve got to come at it from every direction.”

“You don’t have to do this,” says the box’s conscience.

Nine finally glances over his shoulder, his face full of derision and scorn. “Why would I do it if I didn’t have to?”

“Commit genocide? Do you ever count—”

“Can you even comprehend what a Time War is? Or when I say ‘Time War that wiped out my kind’ do you just imagine Star Wars with clocks?”

The thing that is not Rose pouts. “Star Wars with clocks, yeah.”

Nine actually smirks. “You want to know why you’re not Rose?”

“I know I’m not Rose,” says the Bad Wolf.

“I’m talking to the piece of you in there that _is_ Rose,” says The Doctor. Then he adds, with his hand cupped against his mouth, “if you can hear me!”

“I _am_ Rose Tyler,” says the Bad Wolf.

“No. You’re Rose Tyler with a twist of Time Lord, and I will take it from you again, and again, and again, until the end of time itself. A part of me can already see it. I’m taking it from you right now.”

“Don’t, you’ll make me blush.”

“Time Lords can see everything, can’t we? Just like the Tralfamadorians of the planet Tralfamadore. But unlike Tralfamadorians, we weave ourselves three-dimensional vessels and ignore it most of the time, mostly to prevent everything falling apart.”

“Yes,” says the Bad Wolf, “I’m familiar.”

“You’re not, Rose, because you’re not a Time Lord, even though I can tell how much you’re enjoying the sensation. It didn’t even drive you mad—no wonder you’re so irreplaceable.”

“I am more than a Time Lord.”

Nine uses his hand to mime a talking mouth and turns back to the puzzle box. The structure he is assembling now has enough pieces to resemble a crude city skyline. “You humans have your own Time War, you know. Circa 2350, barring pandemics, nuclear warfare, climate catastrophe, etc.”

The Bad Wolf girl closes her eyes. “I can’t see it.”

“Because I stop it from happening. That was our job, once—the Time Lords. Until we got all tangled up in our own rules.”

“I thought the Time War was about the daleks.”

“The daleks are a warrior race, they’ll shoot at anything that moves, and they’re not particularly clever about it. The Time Lords are the dangerous element of a Time War, always have been.”

“The genocide of your entire race,” echoes Rose.

Nine turns to look at her again. “Do I ever talk about it?”

“No. And I can’t see much of it, either.”

Nine turns back. “No, you wouldn’t be able to.”

The Bad Wolf girl appears crouched behind the model city. “I thought I could see everything.”

The Doctor focuses on the gears. “You can’t see things that never happened.”

Rose narrows her eyes. “How can you end a war that never started?”

“Things end before they start all the time.”

“You’re being coy.”

“No, I’m looking at a problem from a fourth dimensional perspective. I’m hiding in a box with a bit of the future. We lost, I ran, it never happened, I wasn’t there, it doesn’t exist. And neither does my entire planet. All because of a stupid plan that didn’t even work, as evidenced by the parallel present we are both currently experiencing.”

“Pesky little fuckers, those daleks.”

“You’re telling me.”

“You’re wrong, you know. It’s happening right now.”

“And I’m not looking at it. El ultimo hombre no recuerde. Does it make a sound?” For the first time, Nine looks to the Bad Wolf with something different in his eyes – a plea. “You were going to ask about the children.”

“Yes.”

“Let me show you something.” The Doctor holds his hands up into the air experimentally, hovering near the Bad Wolf girl’s temples.

She hesitates. “This is about the children you’re killing?”

“Eventually. Not billions of people—just one person. It’s about the Time War, on Earth. It’ll interest you.”

Rose gives a shy nod. The Doctor touches the tips of his fingers to Rose’s temples and says to himself, “I really ought to do this more often.”

*

The straw-strewn, sunlit shack dissolves into a woebegone gas station Qwik-Mart lit with fluorescent lights. One of the lights is flickering. Packets of high-color junk food have been knocked from the shelves and are strewn about on the floor. At the front of the store, by the register, a man in a clown mask has a young brown girl on her knees with a gun pressed to her head. A young man in a ragged jacket armed only with a hammer stands five feet from them. Rose and the Doctor materialize behind this young man, by the sports drinks.

“That’s me,” says the Doctor with a sanctimonious nod and a casual gesture towards the man with the hammer, “and _that,”_ he points to the girl with the terrified eyes, “is the future President of the United States.”

“Her?”

The man in the clown mask fires, and the girl dies.

“Well, she _was._ Humans don’t really respect the whole ‘fixed point’ system.”

The gas station rumbles, and dust falls from the ceiling. “Earthquake,” the Doctor explains. “Consequences, kickback. This whole place is going to go up in flames in a minute. Not that it matters.” The man with the hammer obviously feels that it matters. Nine ignores him. “All we’ve got to do is find out who this clown is, make sure he’s never born. Assuming that the parallel government doesn’t figure out the plan and assure that _I_ was never born. Not to mention the beasts that seep in to eat the weaker timelines.” A weird dragon-beast claws at the Qwik-Mart door with a histrionic screech. “Memory’s dissolving. Let’s get out of here.”

Nine takes Rose’s hand.

*

Back in the shack.

“And that’s with about a dozen of you using crude and imprecise methods of time travel,” says the Doctor, both hands rummaging around in the puzzle box as if nothing just happened. “Imagine what a whole planet of Time Lords can do.”

“Doctor—”

“Forget it. It’s lost. Gallifrey has lost more timelines than it can remember. Think of the children? They’re already gone. Their lives have been rewritten so many times that the only conclusion possible—the only—”

The piece of the puzzle the Doctor is holding – a fragile bit of metal, no larger than a hairpin – snaps in two.

Nine stares at it for a moment.

The Bad Wolf girl holds out her hand.

Nine places the fragments in her palm. The Bad Wolf curls her hand into a fist, and when she opens it again, the hairpin is repaired.

“Thanks,” says the Doctor.

“Anytime,” says Rose.

The Doctor fits the hairpin into a miniature clock tower he has been building at the center of the city, and the tiny hands on its face begin to move.

“So,” says the Bad Wolf, “what makes you judge and jury?”

“It’s already lost.”

Rose tilts her head. “Sorry?”

“As long as we’re fighting it, we’ve already lost. Think of the timelines, Rose. I was there for them. I can still see them. All the futures that will never happen. All the people that were never born. All the paintings that never—”

Nine tucks his head briefly into his shoulder, so Rose can’t see his face.

The Bad Wolf rests her hand on the Doctor’s elbow. “We both know exactly what’s going to happen.”

The Doctor looks up. “Do you? You’re confident? You’re certain?”

Rose frowns. “Nothing is lost, Doctor. Everything always is.”

“Until it isn’t. There’s always a point where it isn’t. Look away, and it’s gone. Forgotten. If you’re lucky—reduced to a fairy tale. And I’m not in it. You know what? _Good._ ” He does not sound like he thinks it’s ‘good.’

The thing that is almost Rose sits in silence for a moment. “I wanted to give you something,” she says, “while I’m here.”

Nine looks up. “Give me something?” People don’t usually give him things.

“Since the entire future might collapse at any moment, and everything. I do, um, love you. And I just thought…” She hands the Doctor a small blue box wrapped in white ribbon.

“What, are we getting engaged?”

“If we were getting engaged, I would’ve got a nicer ribbon.”

The Doctor opens the box.

There is an asymmetrical hunk of white rock inside. It is alternatively coarse and smooth, and sparkles in places. The Doctor takes it to his tongue and tastes it. “It’s rock salt,” he says.

“I found it at Bad Wolf Bay,” says Rose. “And I wanted to give it to you, but since we might never meet, or, can’t ever meet again, depending – I thought I’d give it to you here, in the past. I mean, I’m still here, but I don’t know how much time I’ve got. I know you probably think… humans giving each other rocks as a token of a promise, or, a feeling… I know it’s pretty… stupid…” The Doctor turns the rock salt over in his hands. “It dissolves in water,” she adds.

The Doctor looks at the rock instead of the girl. “Thank you,” he says, very quietly.

He slips the rock salt into the breast pocket of his coat.

The puzzle box makes an odd locking sound.

“Oh, come on, I was _right there!”_

“I think that means it’s finished.”

It’s not finished. It’s never finished. He’s been fighting this war for as long as he can remember.

“You do get out of this shack,” says the Bad Wolf. “With or without me.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Schrodinger’s city.”

“Schrodinger’s Bad Wolf girl.”

The Bad Wolf shivers. “I have this condition where I always think it’s the end of the world.”

“I’ll take it from you,” says the Doctor, earnest and sure. How he wants to take it from her. How he is basking in the sensation of taking it from her, how a piece of him is always thinking of that point in his future, and later, in his past. If he makes it that far. He admits to himself that he hopes that he makes it that far, hopes for it desperately. “You give me hope, you know. Hope that despite… everything… I might not be a totally shit Doctor.”

“I think you’re magnificent.”

“Then you won’t mind if I do this?”

With the index finger of his left hand, the Doctor spins the minute hand of the miniature clock tower’s face counterclockwise. When he pulls back, it keeps spinning in reverse, and slowly the mechanical city falls to pieces, unbuilding itself: Gallifrey no more.

Nine watches it fall. “I’m sorry I didn’t dote on you more,” he says. “Bit focused on the puzzle. And I can’t be sure if I can trust anything that comes out of that pretty mouth, as much as I would like to.” He pats the rock salt in his breast pocket.

But the Bad Wolf girl is gone.

“Rose?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. :) If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you. If you _really_ enjoyed it, I'd like to have dinner with you at your earliest possible convenience. And if you're Dale Pike, I hope I didn't do you too much of a disservice. Am I secretly hoping that I'll inspire you to write a much better Doctor Who fic? Maybe. But I'll be happy if you read this at all. *bows low*
> 
> _If I get old  
>  Remind me of this  
> The night we kissed  
> And I really meant it_
> 
> _Whatever happens  
>  If we're still speaking  
> Pick up the phone  
> Play me this song._


End file.
